Just like Executives and Business Owners, Olympians use consultants to problem-solve. But unlike most business and civic leaders, Olympians invest in winning edge-focused coaching. Makes sense – top tier athletes don’t coach just to get over broken ankles, even if they’re recuperating from one. They coach for breakthroughs and transformation.

Likewise, top tier leaders don’t just coach to put out fires, they coach to sharpen and maintain their edge – to break through the status quo. I’ve recently shifted from calling my services “coaching” because “counsel” seems more appropriate. To me “counsel” embraces everything that coaches do but offers a greater depth of service.

Whether you’re squarely in the driver’s seat, changing vehicles, or ready for a radical sabbatical away from the steering wheel, good consulting can have a major impact on your effectiveness and efficiency for increasing:
profits, stakeholder loyalty, innovation, leadership and organizational capacity, excellence, vitality, work/life balance and team coherence.

Are you clear on your own set points between the data and your inner GPS?

Most of us are sub-consciously wonk-oriented by way of our cultural norms for valuing things like growth, numbers, domination and successive goal setting. At the same time, there is a universal ancestral wisdom and emerging cultural trend toward valuing values like compassion, partnership, inclusion, emergence, and transparency.

On the universal scale of yin and yang, Modern Industrial culture has highly valued the yang and seriously de-valued the yin. Just like electricity in the wall, it doesn’t work to have mostly one kind of charge. There’s a universal re-balancing going on and we’re all a part of it. Consciousness of that re-balancing brings greater ability to negotiate it.

Reflection Exercise: Take a few deep breaths. Once settled and centered, when you breathe in, imagine your breath going to that ever-shifting balance point between the wise and the wonky in your world. Breathe out any tension, charge, disorientation or unsettledness.

Practice everyday until you sense equanimity with that ever-dynamic balance point.